wildzzz

I don't read nearly as much as I should but I do listen to a lot of audiobooks. My wife scoffs at my collection, a lot of spy or military thrillers like Mitch Rapp and Jack Ryan (The Company is one of my favorites) but also Bobiverse and Expanse are great. Meanwhile she buys lots of books but reads none of them. Audiobooks aren't a perfect substitute for reading but they do stop me from doomscrolling or listening to stupid podcasts.

As for podcasts, Hardcore History and Blowback are my favorites that aren't political junk. I know people have their opinions on pop history media but it's interesting content and entertaining.

I like using the Apricorn keypad flash drives. Like this Lenovo, it's doesn't connect until you unlock it. Password entry is via the built-in keypad so no software is necessary. It's also got a small battery so you can unlock it before you plug it which could prevent someone sniffing the USB 5V rail for any noise. Needing an app makes the Ironkey useless for anything that isn't running a normal desktop OS.

My first ever electronics project was an altoids tin with two 9Vs, a 7805, and a USB port on a piece of protoboard I found in my grandfather's old electronics parts bins. I followed an Instructable to make it. After that, I was hooked. My next project was a dice roller I got from a copy of Make magazine. I ordered most of the parts off digikey. I loved the little projects in Make magazine, I thought it was so cool that you could just build your own electronics.

My tinnitus requires loud fans. Also fan noise is always a good indicator of power.

When I was in highschool, I bought a secondhand Poweredge 1800-something hoping to make it my new home server after the Pentium 4 desktop I had been rocking. It was so fucking loud, I couldn't find a place to keep it that wasn't audible throughout the house. My parents were not happy.

Lol the vast majority of pirates are not paying for anything. Maybe a very wealthy and ethical person is fine paying for something after they've sampled the pirated version but a good chunk of the world never had the money to afford buying it in the first place. There's plenty of ways to sample media nowadays that doesn't involve piracy, there's infinite review channels on YouTube and you can often listen to new albums for the price of watching ads. Sure, I'm sure there are many pirates willing to see a movie in theaters or attend a concert because those are experiences you can't get at home. But for something like a PC game or application, the paying customer and pirate have an identical experience (excluding online multiplayer, that often doesn't work for pirated games).

More data can support changing performance limits. They also may have been more conservative in the past when the rover was new because they wanted to ensure it met its mission requirements. Since the rover has long past its original mission duration (1 year, it's been 5), they can relax a bit more and take bigger risks to achieve bigger goals.

Ingenuity does have an RT ProASIC3 (an older rad hard FPGA) on board so presumably that could be what's handling the voting. Since the Snapdragon was originally used for navigation and operates much, they could be voting at a higher level rather than actual CPU output. When it was still a helicopter, the various sensors and actuators all connect to the FPGA so the voting could be based on commands to the actuators (turn left, reduce power, etc.)

New York's favorite thing to do is vote in the worst people and then complain nonstop.

I like how the Special Agent's affidavit just looks like his wife caught him sports betting and he figured out a way to make it look like he was really investigating a crime.

Printers definitely do wear out. We had a very nice Canon for 10 years and slowly got out of alignment. There's a method to realign the print heads but it got to the point where it was beyond the adjustment limits. You could see the offset between the black and color inks in plain text. An interesting effect but not so much when you're trying to make something look good. Additionally, it would jam more often. The paper dust accumulation in the mechanisms seemed to be what was causing that. Everything went downhill as we were doing a lot of printing for our wedding and it was unfixable by the time we were done. It was a good printer, it deserved its place in Printer Valhalla.

Now we have a Brother that is also very nice but lacks the photo printing quality that the Canon had. We so rarely print photos anyway that it's just easier to send an order to CVS or Walgreens to have them do it.

For some of those devices, they use very bespoke CPUs that are simply not documented publicly.

It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.

That's probably why the number of new questions asked dropped off. Once someone has asked "how to fizzbuzz in python", that's pretty much it. You'll get the textbook answer, the "why are you fizzbuzzing in the first place" answers, and then an answer a couple years later using the new python fizzbuzz built in library. You have a massive compendium of questions and answers and for most people, that's good enough. I don't think that stack overflow was necessarily less popular in visitors pre-LLMs but they certainly killed it off quick.

"hey there goes that guy with no plates again"

It's race in all but name. They actually get around it by specifying everything about a person other than race, like skin color, accent or language skills.

If they need a Viet person for a role in a Vietnam War movie, they'll cast for "native or fluent Vietnamese speakers". Of course it's entirely plausible that a black guy is a fluent Vietnamese speaker but auditions are very subjective so good luck proving that the black guy played the role of NVA Soldier #1 better than the actual Vietnamese guy.

There is a thing called Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications where an employer could discriminate against protected classes because the job description is so specific. Like if a church wanted to hire a new pastor, the job description requires the applicant to be Christian and likely a specific denomination, and any non-christian would be disqualified from the position. BFOQs must be spelled out in the job description to make it absolutely clear that the qualifications are necessary for the job. Also age, sex, and gender can be BFOQs like if the job description is for an acting role of a specific character. Race could potentially apply to something like an acting job too but that's a lot more of a dicey subject, like it would need to be absolutely critical to the production that a character is a specific race.

And for me, I'd rather do my own assembly than pay $1400 for five boards from Circuithub that I can get from JLCPCB for $20 or OSHPark for $50.

I see a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube of cops stopping drug traffickers for bullshit reasons (5 over speed limit on highway, crossing the line, following too closely) and it's usually a state or county cop that's on a federal task force or they'll have a "civilian ride along" in the car that gets way more involved than any civilian would ever be. They aren't actually an employee of the FBI but they have credentials from the FBI due to their task force job, it gives them access to FBI databases and bulletins while they still maintain their normal police job.

It's really bizarre to watch those videos because they are very routine. They stop the person for marginal lawbreaking, ask them to step out and sit in the front of their cruiser, then the traffic violations turn into warnings, cop makes basic small talk while writing warning and pretty much ignores everything suspect says, cop asks about any contraband in the car and asks to search, suspect usually (stupidly) agrees to search, cops pretty much instantly find the drugs. And if the suspect says no to the search, the K9 unit is already pulling up behind them because they were called before the cop ever turned on their lights and siren.

It's incredibly obvious these are pretextual stops. There is definitely a national program tracking license plates because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.

I'm pretty sure that's how they caught that megachurch pastor smuggling drugs for the cartel, they look for travel patterns for license plates and especially look at rental car registrations. You can't pull over every car but you can definitely look for cars making repeated trips, especially those that are made to known trafficking cities.

I had a friend from highschool that got pretty involved with his mom with drug trafficking. They caught him at some Indian reservation that overlaps upstate NY and Canada. The arrest affidavit states the cops saw a car parked for a couple hours at a casino and then followed the car to the border of the Indian reservation. Then they waited for the car to leave and then pulled him over for crossing a line. Of course they found significant ketamine in the car. The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.

Many militaries are still buying rifles that chamber a cartridge introduced in 1891 (7.62x54mmR). I'd argue a cartridge initially developed for a long bolt action rifle (Mosin-Nagant) that can now be fired out of a variant of a AK-patten select-fire bull-pup (Vepr) fits the analogy.

The card vending machines are effectively rate limited, you need to wait to make a purchase. This is so one person can't empty the entire machine, even if they have multiple payment methods.

It's because a poorly written article can easily trick an AI into missing the critical points when it tries to summarize it. Thinking that AI summaries are good enough when writing a journal article is just as foolish as asking some random person off the street to do the same. AI can be very helpful but please don't publish AI slop like this guy.

Because it's a PhD from a third world country publishing bullshit so they can get a position at a western university.

That's exactly what I've said when someone has suggested moving away from my favorite tool to their favorite tool. I've literally said "Uh, don't forget, we'll likely need an 8 hour training course for a dozen engineers.", saw the numbers crunching in the PM's head and then they'll say "Maybe we'll circle back on moving to X, I'll need to request more funding for next year."

I've seen malware popups that give detailed steps on how to install the app on Android. You can put up all the scary warnings you want but if someone really wants to install some scam app, they will click past everything.

I really wish we could have a simple "don't bother me, I know what I'm doing" switch on these phones but I can certainly understand the reasons why Apple and Google are putting in as many roadblocks as possible to protect users from themselves.

Data visualization is such a dead end product. Wow lots of pretty charts, can you actually interpret the data and make an informed decision? Any idiot can throw shit into Excel and make charts and pivot tables. An AI that can not only interpret the data but also offer advice on how one should react is way more valuable.

Of course you shouldn't just rely on AI that's consumed every MBA book to give you all of your business advice. Sometimes the textbook response is not always the best response.

True but at least Claude does the work for me too. It's going to build me whatever I want despite how correct of a choice it is.

Companies are almost always better off bringing in one experienced consultant that actually knows how to stand up the project and help hire the team to make it happen.

We used to have a very experienced systems engineer that we'd contract whenever a chief engineer had an idea that gained traction with directors. The systems engineer would help layout the structure and timeline of the project, basically identifying how much money and the types of people we'd need. He'd stick around long enough to get the project to the final design review and then go do something else when we started building stuff. By that point, the PM is deeply involved and the team is cohesive and productive. Maybe it's just a coincidence but every big project we've tried to stand up without his help would struggle tremendously in the early stages.

Yeah a lot of those fancy PDF features are Adobe-only. It's not that other apps can't support those features, it's that no one in their right mind wants to spend endless amounts of money and time trying to sandbox it.

Most people have some understanding that shady websites can give you malware, a drive-by exploit is pretty rare but it's good that most people think just visiting a site could infect your computer. But a PDF is just a document, right? Just thinking that a PDF is just words on a page is exactly why it's such an insidious threat. Or they'll get a PDF as an email attachment, see that it's not an exe or something weird, and open it because they think a document is safe.

That's kind of what Adobe does with downloaded PDFs, you have to click the Enable button to turn on more document features. My schematic capture app will output a PDF that has links that will take you to specific spots on a page and also some JavaScript where you can right click on a part and see it's BOM information. None of that stuff works until you click the Enable button. I've also seen some vendors offer not only normal 3D model files and 2D drawings but a PDF that has an interactive 3D model inside. It's kinda cool how much random shit can go into a PDF but it's clearly a massive malware vector.

One neat thing I've seen is a PDF that will ping an IP catcher when opened in Adobe, regardless of the security level. The same can be done with word docs, excel spreadsheets, and even SVGs.

I've stayed in some places where no one had rented the place for a few days beforehand. I get in town early and want to at least drop off my bags or maybe just shower or nap. In a few of these cases, there's been a cleaning crew there finishing up. I don't think the cleaners are always showing up right after you leave. They obviously will if there is someone else checking in that day but I think it's more likely cleaners will come before you arrive rather than immediately after. I think this is especially true for the places that ask you to dispose of trash and wash any dishes before you go, they don't want rotting food sitting around attracting pests.